Camwhores.com was still images only, but that didn’t stop us from having members-only shows. A members-only show at CW in the early days meant that the girl doing the show at her pre-determined time would occupy the first cam image slot on the portal for the duration of her show and then she would upload a specific number of photos in a progression, 30 seconds apart. The viewing audience anticipated each shot. Sometimes these were shot live with a webcam, but sometimes, like in this example, they were pre-shot, but still with a progression.
This is one I did called “Good Sister/Bad Sister”, after the Hole song of the same name. Circa February 2004. All pics were self-shot with a self-timer and a camera borrowed from Blake’s work.
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…long story short, I put as much faith in WordPress to save when I tell it to, as I do LiveJournal, and that was a big mistake.
So San Francisco.
The reasons I went to San Francisco are the following:
1. I wanted to try every form of weed I could get my hands on.
2. I wanted to spend time with my friend Steph who’s healing just like me, but in a whole new life in a whole new place with whole new people.
3. I wanted to take advantage of SF’s connectivity and CA’s produce in general and eat good, healthy foods I can’t get at home – delivered.
4. I wanted to spend time with my friend Kat and if you know Kat at all, which some of you do, there’s no “because” necessary. She’s Kat-fucking-neko and she’s one of my oldest cyberpals. The very inspiration for me becoming a camgirl.
5. I wanted to be in a place with sunshine and no snow during what is the worst time of winter for me at home, which happened to have also coincided with my birthday (based on flights/weekends).
Everything else beyond that was icing on my birthday cake. And oh what a cake it was…this was the brainchild of a little bit of Blake, a dash of Belinda and a whole lotta Kat…
Most of it is a reference to my favourite MFC model, who refers to her fans as “cyberpals”.
The green purse was a raffle prize of said model.
These are raffle tickets for said model’s raffle and the number 28 because each raffle ticket was 28 tokens because that’s the model’s favourite number. Kat bought me lots of raffle tickets but I didn’t win. (Long story.)
This MFC model calls herself an “internet sensation”, cuz she is.
I’m humbled my cyberpals would bestow upon me the same honour.
Kat threw me my first birthday party since grade 5 and my old school camgirl friends Sapphire and Artfag and Steph and their significant others all came. It was so surreal with all these old school camgirls in the same place. Like, I could barely speak. All I could do was listen. Especially with Camwhores closing and all that comes with that, I was just sorta there taking it all in. We talked and ate lots of delicious food prepared by Kat and Blake and then we streamed cake-eating at Camwhores. Steph got mushy in her card and lamented about how we’ve seen each other change and grow into like, “adult girls”, and it was super apparent looking around Kat’s living room at how much all of our lives had changed from 10-15 years ago, that the same really went for all of us. It is so fucked up saying that. That we did or do something that long. I remember Madison on my lap when I was on Portal 9.
I’m sort of spacey today. Camwhores is closing on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning and I feel like I have to like, be there as much as possible, get in as much time there as possible, before it’s gone forever. I’d never be able to write a farewell post or eulogy to Camwhores, so I’m not gonna try, but Kat did remind me that once upon a time I had been writing a book on cam culture and I realized that some of it might be relevant now. I found a hard copy (cuz I print & never throw away anything, but lose digital files constantly), which Blake read yesterday and he says that the chapter on Jennicam is probably worth sharing as it has some relevance to what’s happening now, and the Camwhores chapter naturally. I’m not sure if I finished the CW chapter. Anyway, I was going to type up the Jennicam chapter and share it here when I got around to it and then either on my last show (Wednesday morning @ 1am-2am EST) or an impromptu time before, I would go on streaming cam and read the Camwhores chapter. I dunno.
San Francisco was good for me and Blake. It was good for us to be around people who are geeky in similar ways to us and creative in similar ways to us and who make and build and create things the way we do. There is good stuff on the horizon as a direct result of this trip, as I was pretty damn sure there would be. When I imagined the words “San Francisco” in my head, I imagined the letters made out of glass containing live blue lightning with a plug on one end for me to plug myself in and recharge. And that’s what I did.
Like literally, pretty much every day I woke up, smoked or vaped some form of weed and worked on some stuff online (but I took the week off of my job, so it wasn’t like, paid work) while watching US Netflix and waiting for people to come over to our airbnb, which you can see here. And I just hung out with my friends as if we lived there and this were any other day and it was great.
Edibles Day was pretty fun. Steph got us TWO brownies from a dispensary that had 500mg of THC in each of them (Black Mamba) and she predicted that for her tolerance, she would need to eat 1/4 to 1/2 of a brownie. We weren’t sure what MY tolerance was gonna be like because edibles had never worked on me before and the whole point of Edibles Day was to try and figure out if I truly was immune to them or not. I’d tried them a good 7 or 8 times and they’ve never had an effect. Doesn’t matter what kind of food it is sweet, savory, greasy, creamy, gummy – it’s never worked on me.
Here’s the brownie:
Here’s me and Steph trying to get the damn thing down:
It took about 600mg of THC (a brownie and 1/4) for me to be “stoned” – but I never got that “body high” people talk about – for about 20 minutes. I think the brownies were about $35 each so obviously this would not be a cost effective or realistic way for me to medicate. Do note that they legalized medical marijuana in New York recently, but ONLY edibles on the logic that smoking is bad for you. I’m living proof of how idiotic that is. Patients need choice, variety and freedom.
This is a vape pen with 500mg of cannabis oil.
This one was “Blue Dream” and was my first taste of California.
It is super duper stupid that these are not legal/we can’t get these in Canada.
This is wax, wax, glorious wax.
Just another form of cannabis concentrate.
You vape or smoke it.
Forget which has more THC in it though.
I think wax has more THC than oil which has more THC than smoking or vaping dried weed.
Weed & wax.
This is called shatter.
Another weed concentrate that is the consistency of taffy and I think has the highest percentage of THC overall.
This stuff you vape with a “rig” by doing “dabs”.
I got to meet cyberpal Erica, of former-Camwhores fame (the cute one from Florida with really big boobs, she’s a boxer now and careful talking about her boobs cuz she could fuck your shit up physically and virtually!), and she gave me a really nice refillable vape pen and some hash to put in it, the strain of which I remembered 5 seconds ago, FUCK! I didn’t end up putting the hash or anything else in it though because I didn’t want them to confiscate the pen at the border and Blake said the hash smelled a little weedy to him even with the container closed (I dunno how much drug dogs can smell). I can get hash at home, that’s actually the one concentrate I have access to, but the pen was a gift so it was more important. I smoked some of the hash in the bong I was using though and it was very hashy. In the container it was pre-ground, which I found interesting because it comes in circular chunks here.
Part of the reason I wanted to go balls to the wall and basically have a weed vacation was to test limits and tolerance and how you would medicate with the various types of things. I also wanted to see what California dispensary system quality was like compared to Canada’s pharmaceutical Licenced Producer system since Doug Benson and I got in a Twitter fight over it a while back. On his YouTube show this fall, he told his guests they were smoking a Sativa and that it was called “Blueberry”. At that same moment, I was smoking an Indica called “Blueberry”, THE Indica named “Blueberry” because “Blueberry” IS an Indica, not a Sativa. I verified this on Leafly. He DMs me, saying how there are no standards and Leafly can be wrong smileyface. (Note: Leafly is a former sponsor of his show.) He wasn’t following me so I couldn’t DM him back, but I tweeted @ him that that sucks and I’m sorry that’s how it is where he lives because it’s not like that here. Keep in mind, I am part of a legal, pharmaceutical program where specific, standardized testing is mandatory and there are product recalls & shit when they fuck up. It had never occurred to me that it would not be the same rules in California, like part of the state law or whatever, since medical had been legal there for so long. He throws a shit fit at me – again, in DM so no one else can see this – about how he’s been more places than me, that names and labels of strains are just slapped on and there’s no consistency from club to club, state to state. Then he blocked me “so we won’t argue anymore”. I was trying to have a conversation, who knew he was such a baby?
Anyway, he’s basically right, as far as California’s testing and labeling. Some stuff had been tested or had claimed to have been tested and those had THC percentages but it wasn’t consistent and because it’s not consistent and not legislated I’m not totally sure I’d take those numbers at face value. A guideline sure, but that’s all. I think packaged edibles are probably consistent because baking is a science and those companies are bigger than farmers and can afford to test. It’s in their best interest to do so. Also as I mentioned in the beginning, I smoke Sativas and the first oil cartridge I had for the vape pen was a Sativa as verified via Leafly, but the second one, called “Green Dragon”, comes up on Leafly as Indica even though it was definitely packaged as Sativa.
Anyway, it’s taken me forever to get this much written up and I started writing this before Camwhores closed and right now that’s all I can think about so I’m just gonna post this and hope it’s entertaining enough for y’all.
Yesterday Camwhores.com, where I have had my webcam exclusively for 14 years and where practically every single one of my friends come from, made a public announcement saying that they will be shutting down the site as of March 17th. I’ve talked with Kevin and there’s nothing to be done, it’s just time. A lot of people have been talking about building new portals or new communities so we all stay together but knowing what I do about what it took to make Camwhores work, I’m not very optimistic anything will last very long. I think the idea that shows the most promise is the subreddit Belinda set up, but I’m not really that much into Reddit so I can’t say if I’ll be in there much. I’ll definitely try. I know I won’t be posting nude cam pics, if I am, because the best part about CW for me, was that all my nudes and shows and sexual anythings were “contained” in one place where all of that was appropriate and inaccessible to minors. I don’t want sex stuff on my site and there’s no such thing anymore as a 30 second refreshing still cam portal. Camwhores was the the first and last one. And even if there was, honestly, I doubt I would trust it unless I knew the person running it. (And anyone I can think of who I’d trust wouldn’t be able to pull it off, I’m fairly sure.)
I’m fucking sad and I can’t stop crying. I had the realization today that since Camwhores is the ONLY place I cammed, if it doesn’t exist, I guess I’m not a camgirl anymore. :o/
A lot of girls will go to MyFreeCams.com and probably make more money, but for some of us, it was never ever about money. And me? I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate streaming video. Loathe. I don’t like watching myself move and talk and hear myself, like I just can’t deal. But at the same time, I can’t not watch. The other thing is that MFC has a lot of trolls who are gonna make fun of me because I have a space between my teeth or because of my scar or because they’re just assholes out to ruin a girl’s day and I did the dealing with those kinds of trolls 15 years ago when the internet was much smaller and my reputation was a lot bigger and I am way too grown to step into that arena and get “rolled in” again. And for what? It’s not like I *have* to show off my body or I can’t live or anything. It’s just that sometimes you wanna post a pic on the internet of (a) body part(s) you can’t show on Instagram or Facebook. Even though we’re all friends, being on CW was/is partly performance, you’re in the spotlight while doing a show, with a totally appreciative audience who all know it’s better to leave for 20 minutes, than to say anything negative because they will be banned for various lengths of time to indefinitely. To express your negative opinion of a camwhore, members could vote them minus or vote all of their pictures 1s (on a scale of 1-10). There was a healthy outlet built into our community for negative feelings and as simple as it was, most of the time it was enough. In recent history, the only egregious thing I can recall is a member got really drunk and went on an awful tirade in chat about one of our girls, who I think was even live at the time, and he had to be given a timeout. But what did he do when his ban was over and he came back? He wrote a sincere public apology to the girl by way of CW’s blogs and while I forget if she actually accepted it, that’s the kind of gestures that could happen in our Camwhores community completely organically. You are never going to find a community on the internet that moderated itself so well, with very few people actually having the ability to moderate. Especially not one that grew out of the E/N scene. (I actually only know of one person from the E/N scene A) still doing E/N basically and B) making a decent living at it, but some people I know are primed and ready for it to come back.)
There is nowhere on the internet where you can post a picture straight from your webcam, let alone a nude, let alone the most explicit nude you can think of. You can post nudity on Twitter but my mom’s on my Twitter. She was probably okay with naked tree pose last week but I doubt she’d be happy knowing the precise colour of my labia. And the picture I *was* gonna post on Camwhores 2 days ago that would be totally within site rules but decided against because I had an ingrown hair and it wouldn’t be perfect enough, would almost definitely get me perma-banned from Twitter. And we all know Facebook and Instagram are lame when it comes to nudity in even ART. My friend and fellow artist Ana Voog has been suspended from Facebook a million times for posting artwork barely featuring nudity, it’s ridiculous. I get wanting to keep Facebook a SFW place, I agree with that and think it should be what it is, but when we’re banning art and breastfeeding, something’s fucking wrong with us. And of course there’s Instagram whose most famous hashtag is #freethenipple. Need I say more on that one? (I like to covertly insert my boobs and nether regions into Instagram. Only I know it’s there or what it is, but it’s there dammit.) You can get naked on tumblr. Yes. Yes, you can. Tumblr is basically the 2nd last place on the internet I’d like to be, with 4chan taking home the prize. Tumblr just confuses me and ruins all the shows I watch because I download or record them and watch them later and how some of these people get gifs BEFORE the show airs, I have no idea, but tumblr is just a spoiler minefield so I avoid it at all costs. I realize I can stop following these people but sometimes I like seeing the gifs. Anyway, the tumblr community freaks me out and it’s a shitty place to actually communicate with people so that’s just a great big “no”.
So that pretty much leaves LiveJournal – which is totally fine with nudity but a bloody tampon is “obscene”, as Ana found out over a decade ago – and my site. You can’t make a webcam page on LiveJournal. I have a webcam page on my site, but it just tells you to go to Camwhores with a brief description of what I do there and approximately when. If I could change that page, and I only say “if” because it’s a WordPress page, so that my cam image updates every 30 seconds (maybe longer since it won’t be like CW), no archives and there’s a little chat thingy on the page, that would be good. Ideally the chat thingy would be one that you can pop out of the page or one that makes sounds when people talk and one where you can definitely ban people. In my brain, this sounds like an impossible thing, maybe to someone else it sounds simple. I dunno. A bonus to having a cam on my site is that Wes and Madison can be on it, so that would be cool. Instead of a PayPal link (because PayPal gets in a snit if they think you’re using it for anything “adult”), I think fuckit, I’ll accept Bitcoin. Why not? Camming’s not about money to me and Bitcoin’s not even real money to me, but with it there’s still an exchange of value, of appreciation, even if it’s a fragment of a cent. (I have no idea how Bitcoin works but I am signed up with this cool Bitcoin thing that Steph (the Geek) used to tip me enough Bitcoin to buy a cupcake if I’m ever anywhere that takes Bitcoin and has cupcakes that price! It’s made for tipping so it would be perfect. Totally forget what it’s called but it’s in my e-mail.)
Kevin doesn’t think there’s an audience for 320 x 240 static cams anymore but Ana and Steph and I are not so sure about that. What we all do about it remains to be seen. Maybe Everything/Maybe Nothing.
When I was little, I remember constantly telling my mother in screaming fits that I hated her and she would hold me down and hug me and tell me she loved me anyway. This is what comes to mind when things like #WomenAgainstFeminism or female MRAs permeate my well-maintained bubble of white light, as seems to be the case increasingly these days. This “wave” of anti-feminism is hitting the internet like a tsunami and it’s leaving a lot of feminists on the opposite shore empty and at low tide. Feeling defeated. Feeling like, what’s the fucking point if we, as women in general – feminists and anti’s alike – are just going to fight among ourselves rather than work together for common goals that benefit the whole? I can’t really speak for anyone but myself and a few friends, but I honest to god had no idea that SO MANY women would be anti-feminist. Because that’s like being anti yourself and that’s just fucking crazy. But no, they’re out there and there’s a whole lotta vum. And rather than react, I’ve been listening – or trying to, as much as I listen to anything – because whether they like it or not, what’s important to them is important to me because as much as they kick and scream and say they hate me, I listen and send them love, as lame as that sounds, because more than anything I want to understand. Anti-feminists and female MRAs are interesting to me in the way a serial killer might be interesting to someone into true crime shit. (Yeah, I did just compared them to serial killers, but I didn’t mean they were actually *like* the serial killers in what they do or anything.) Female anti-feminists are interesting to me because I’m interested in why and how people have come to the conclusions they have or believe the things they do about a topic I’m interested in, when they are (often) the complete opposite of my own beliefs, ESPECIALLY when I feel those beliefs are against the person’s own best interest. It’s like when poor people vote Conservative, I see these political arguments and memes on social media and think, “you realize this guy’s gonna fuck you right?” but they do it anyway because reasons or whatnot. Or worse, when people tell me they actively DON’T vote. Just like, never tell me that. Please. It hurts my heart. Even just tell me you’re too lazy to vote, that’s a completely acceptable answer. Feel free to not vote, do whatever the fuck you want, but my friends know better than to tell me about it because it makes me insane(r).
I actually have a friend who, I’m not sure if she identifies as an actual MRA or if she’s just more on top of men’s issues than anyone else I know, but she’s flat out told me she’s not a feminist. She was the first woman I’d ever met (or have a relationship with) who didn’t identify as a feminist on some level and when she said it, pretty early on our relationship, it sorta knocked my socks off because she’s, to me, this badass, Amazonian woman with a huge mohawk and piercings, in combat boots; who goes to shows by herself, gives no fucks and listens to Ani DiFranco, whom I recently heard described as being the most misandrous musician ever. (I don’t know any of her music, but Blake likes her so that’s probably accurate.) My friend is also a camgirl and I just kind of assumed all camgirls were feminists by nature of what we do and how we all support one another. This friend especially because I know she’s super pro-sex workers and until that moment, I assumed that was a feminist thing! But that issue doesn’t “belong” to any one group other than sex workers themselves, so that was pretty dumb of me to think. I also completely understand my friend not wanting a label and that’s why I’m not giving her one now – as being an MRA or being anti-feminist – because she’s never claimed that label and she’s never said she’s actively anti-anything and she has said specifically that she doesn’t want to identify with any groups. That was 3 years ago though, and now there’s been this wave of anti-feminists speaking up, so it’s possible she’s changed and has claimed a label. And that’s okay. Mostly we don’t talk about that stuff, though, because we respect the fact that we each see things differently (although I maintain we have more in common than different). She puts up with my “feminist crap” though (my term, not hers) and that’s all I can ask for in a friend. Tolerance. We come from hugely different places, I think, while still believing a lot of the same things and liking the same things and that’s why we’re friends, but on this one thing, I probably drive her bonkers because I’m cool with the feminist label. I wear it proudly. Blake’s cool with the label. Madison’s cool with the label. Wes wears a pink “feminist” 1″ button on his backpack after we asked him if he thought he and Madison should have the same rights and he said, “duh”. We’re all a pretty feminist family and I post feminist crap all over my social media and while I would not call myself a “hardcore” feminist, it sounds like my friend has met some women who have identified as “hardcore” feminists, who I probably wouldn’t agree with completely either by the way they were described.
Anyway.
It’s awesome having friends with different points of view than you and we should love anti-feminists as hard as we know how, even if they don’t appreciate us, because they are proof of feminism’s success. Feminism has been so successful that a lotta women don’t even feel they need it anymore. Yay us! There’s still so much to be done, but don’t you see that as successful? As progress on some demented level? Because I do. At first it made me sad but after digging around and reading what these women have to say, this is what I think.
I dunno, those thoughts just popped into my head. Work meeting in 40 mins.
So I know it’s almost the end of the month now but I wanted to get this up.
Here are some of the pics I saved from my webcam last month, all of which and more can be seen at Camwhores.com (NSFW) where I hang out most weekday mornings!
This was from New Year’s Day when the Winter Classic hockey game happened.
Leafs won. :o)
IT’S THE DECEMBER WEBCAM ROUND-UP THAT I SHOULD HAVE POSTED A WEEK AGO BUT DIDN’T BECAUSE I WAS SICK! HOORAY!
All of these pics are some of the ones that were taken via webcam and uploaded to Camwhores.com during the month of December, where I spend a little while chatting most mornings. The site is NSFW.
